June 27-28: Tsavo East National Park

After leaving Tsavo West National Park, we headed east to Tsavo East National Park for a couple of nights en route to Mombasa where Nancy and I will catch a flight to Zanzibar.

Tsavo East National Park was established in 1948 along with Tsavo West, and it is the largest Park in Kenya, covering an area of 5,308 square miles. The Park hosts the 180-mile long Yatta Plateau, said to be the longest lava flow in the world. Tsavo East is generally flat, with dry plains across which the Athi, Tsavo and Galana (the largest) Rivers flow. Most of the park consists of semi-arid grasslands and scrub savannah and vast areas, and I mean vast, are remote and largely inaccessible. Semi-desert wilderness at its finest I am told (since I can’t say that I experienced it). Here are a few photos of the landscape we visited:

The Park is perhaps most famous for the red elephants, which appear red because of the red-colored soil they bath in. Unbelievably, even though we saw plenty of red-colored elephants, I (we) failed to get a picture. We photographed some gray-colored elephants, but not the red. That was an oversight, sorry. However, I did manage to get a shot of Nancy next to a rather large red-colored termite mound that will give you a picture of the very red soil in much of the Park:

For the first night in Tsavo East, we stayed in Lugard Falls public campsite right on the Galana River a couple of kilometers below the falls.

We had hippos and crocs in the river beside us and at night a mid-size cat wondered through camp unseen by us, having left only tracks. We determined it was likely either a serval cat or caracal cat – way cool. I wish I had brought my game camera. Our evening drive wasn’t too productive but it gave Caitlin, Mook and Nancy one last chance to ride atop the Blue Rhino for viewing – Caitlin especially loved the high viewing platform:

For our second and last night in Tsavo East, we bid a sad farewell to brother Mark, who headed to the states to reunite with Kirsten for the rest of their holiday, and a “see you soon” to Caitlin, who headed to Nairobi with Mark and then flew to Zanzibar, where we will meet up with her. Nancy and I moved south to Ndolo public campsite, which put us closer to Mombassa and our flight to Zanzibar the following day.

Our campsite was situated in a shady grove of trees close to the seasonal Voi River – now dry – and its floodplain. The campsite had decent ablution facilities, which gave us a chance to shower and clean the built up dirt and grime off our bodies from 3 days in the bush without showers. We had the campground to ourselves, except for the resident camp tenders, until the evening when another party arrived. And, oh ya, we shared the campsite with a troop of very vigilant and daring baboons and their cousins, vervet monkeys. These guys were always on the ready for any opportunity to raid. We defended our site and belongings until the very last minute, when I went around the Green Dragon to get something and a baboon hidden in a nearby tree darted in and stole an almost empty carton of oat milk. No big loss, but I hate to see the trash dragged into the bush. There was a water hole about 100 yards from our campsite, so there was constant elephant traffice to and from the water hole. They all skirted the campsite itself, so no close encounters this time. Apparently 10 lions visited the water hole the previous night, according to the camp tender, but we saw and heard none during our visit. I am sorry but I forgot to take a picture of our campsite.

Our evening drive was along the now dry Voi River floodplain which turned out to be elephant central. We must have seen a few hundred elephants in the floodplain grasslands and woodlands. It seemed at times that every where we looked there were elephants. Water sources this time of year are at a premium and the Park maintains a few water holes (or troughs) along the floodplain, so the elephants don’t stray too far. We saw lots of animals and a few cool birds, which I will share here:

Leaving the Park we drove through an “Elephant Grid” fence, one of several we have gone through on this trip, but I failed to talk about. Anyways, the elephant grid is a fence designed to keep elephants either in or out of an area. In this case, the fence keeps elephants from leaving the Park and entering the residential area and farms adjacent to the Park. The fence has flexible wires that stick out from the fence thatI guess would poke the elephent and deter them from crashing through the fence itself. For the vehicle crossings at the gates, the fence includes dangling wires that scrape the top of the vehicle and I presume would frighten an elephant and thus deter them from passing. Here’s what it looks like for a vehicle passing under the hanging wire fence:

From the Wildside:

Here’s a short video of our Tsavo East National Park visit:

Tsavo East National Park composite video (4 minutes)

We are off to Mombasa and then on to Zanzibar. See you there!